Immigrant Fictions: Contemporary Literature in an Age of Globalization

by Rebecca L. Walkowitz

Immigrant Fictions is a groundbreaking collection that brings together studies of world literature, book history, narrative theory, and the contemporary novel to challenge methods of critical reading based on national models of literary culture. Contributors suggest that contemporary novels by immigrant writers need to be read across several geographies of production, circulation, and translation. Analyzing work by David Peace, George Lamming, Caryl Phillips, Iva Pekarkova, Yan Geling, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Anchee Min, and Monica Ali, these essays take up a range of critical topics, including the transnational book and the migrant writer, the comparative reception history of postcolonial fiction, transnational criticism and Asian-American literature in the U. S., mobility and feminism in translation, linguistic mediation and immigrating fictions, migration and the politics of narrative form.

180 pages, Paperback

First published April 2, 2007

About the author

Rebecca L. Walkowitz is professor of English and affiliate faculty in the comparative literature program at Rutgers University. Her books are Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (2015) and Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (2006).